Baker McKenzie has advised Bell Potter Securities Limited as underwriter of a A$30 million underwritten placement and share purchase plan by Appen Limited. Funds raised will be used by Appen as part of the US$80 million (A$105.3 million) acquisition of LeapForce Inc.

Baker McKenzie lead partner on the transaction, Frank Castiglia stated: "We were delighted to have acted on this capital raising having previously advised Bell Potter Securities Limited as underwriters of the initial public offering and listing on ASX of Appen Limited in 2014.The underwriting arrangements for this capital raising needed to be carefully structured to align with the requirements of the acquisition in the US and the ancillary debt financing arrangements "

The integration of Leapforce’s highly automated technology platform, Appen’s 20+ year track record of delivering high-quality, human-annotated data and the combined crowd of over 1.2 million workers will enable automation, scalability and efficiency improvements to deliver greater quality, responsiveness and value to customers worldwide.

Appen is a global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Appen brings over 20 years of experience capturing and enriching a wide variety of data types including speech, text, image and video. With deep expertise in more than 180 languages and access to a global crowd of over 400,000 skilled contractors, Appen partners with technology, automotive and eCommerce companies – as well as governments worldwide – to help them develop, enhance and use products that rely on natural languages and machine learning.

Leapforce empowers data scientists to build awesome machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms using its global network of highly-skilled data analysts. Leapforce provides human evaluation and annotation of datasets for use in search, text, image, video and mapping in over 35 countries, covering more than 28 different languages and locales. Leapforce has a proven track record of delivering high-quality, human-evaluated datasets to leading technology partners, empowering them to build better services and products.

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